Chilly Uilly's new EP on Flexi Cuts rang our bell, so to speak. Sebastiano Panizza, the producer behind the alias (and the human being, it’s important to remember that behind a job title there’s always flesh and bones), comes from the Italian Alps and lives somewhere between deep house, broken beat and leftfield electronics, which reads like a playlist title on paper but in an era where labelling and defining people is an obsolete practice, feels lived-in and essentially free. The idea behind it is flâner, the old French habit of wandering with no destination, very Agnès Varda, very Baudelaire in trainers, and Egeon's photo of a Trento skatepark on the sleeve nails it: personal memory that somehow turns into everybody’s, without “everybody” knowing it. Anyway, jumping straight into the music, the title track opens as the slow seducer. A bassline holds the whole house up while the harmonic bits curl around it, the track swells, fills out, then dissolves again like it was never trying to prove anything. "Hey It's Me" tightens up, BPM creeping, but what really runs the show are the gaps. We’re persuaded that silences and pauses are the whole game in music, which is painfully obvious and still worth repeating, mostly to ourselves. A voice talks to an answering machine, saying things that hint at other things, and the best part is, at least for our ears, there's no official reading. Take what you want from it, which is always a good concept to internalise. "Sixth Sense" is our pick, a broken-beat number with a snapped, elegant rhythm that gets straight to the point, and vocals that talk rather than sing. They settle onto the instruments and give the groove flesh instead of just plugging holes, because the instrumental alone would already be very, very cool. The words are about a sixth sense that keeps you alive and afloat until it's time to take off and fly. And the instrumental version comes right after. "Véronique et Prévert" closes things out, and with a title like that it's more French wandering, Prévert being the poet who built a career on actually looking at ordinary streets. Here, we’re in pure harmony territory: pads laid out wide, a listen that leaves room, music for the part of the day that's begging for some, far from routine. Play it when there's a big open space in front of you, or when there isn't and you need help imagining one. Basically a service, soul maintenance with no appointment needed… Then there's the label, and the backstory is too good to skip. Flexi Cuts grew out of Flexi Dischi, the record shop that has been pushing good music for good people since 1984 in Lugo (Ravenna). A shop turning into a label is always a lovely plot twist: the people who spent decades handing records to others also press their own like a greengrocer who, after selling other people’s produce, decides one day to grow his own and sell it directly. It's independent, house and electronics in every direction, local artists next to collaborations from everywhere, plus merch that looks and feels genuinely nice, which these days is a rare bonus. Italy is always told as the country that's behind musically and culturally, mostly by those of us living in it, so when something fresh and healthy gets made here we're doubly happy to play ambassador. Francesco Brini's mastering at Spectrum Studio in Bologna keeps everything sitting right. So, the verdict: this EP doesn't chase the floor, it chases a mood, and it catches it. Sometimes the best records are the ones that just let you drift.

Release date 9th of October 2026